The second PROMOTO Workshop was held in Portland, Oregon, as part of SPLASH/OOPSLA 2014, October 20–24, 2014. Programming with Mobile and Touch (PROMOTO) is a forum for embracing the new realities of always-connected and/or touch-enabled devices. Topics under discussion included cross-platform computing, cloud computing, social applications, privacy, and security. The challenges of new types of devices, such as large screens or gadgets with no screens, are very important.

Keynote Speaker - Peli de Halleux

Programming gadgets with gadgets

Hardware 2.0 is upon us: cheap micro-controller boards like Arduino have gained massive adoption in recent years. Paired with 3D printers, cheap sensors and actuators, it allows anyone to prototype the next hot gadget. And yet, the maker will have to learn a soup of software language and framework to build a connected IoC solution: C++ for the micro-controller code, HTML + javascript for the client, some backend language and a communication layer to interact with the devices. In this session, we will show an attempt at unifying the compilation of web server code, rich client and embedded firmware under a simple mobile friendly language and IDE.

Jonathan ‘Peli’ de Halleux is a Principal Research Software Design Engineer in the Research in Software Engineering group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, USA, where he has been since October 2006 working on the TouchDevelop, Pex and CodeHunt projects. Peli has a passion for new technology and recently put smartphones in footballs to collect data in the cloud. From 2004 to 2006, he worked in the Common Language Runtime (CLR) as a Software Design Engineer in Test in charge of the Just In Time compiler. Before joining Microsoft, he earned a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the Catholic University of Louvain.

Theme and goals

Today, easy-to-use mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are becoming more prevalent than traditional PCs and laptops. New programming languages are emerging to enable programmers to develop software easily—leveraging the exciting advances in existing hardware, and providing abstractions that fit the capabilities of target platforms with multiple sensors, touch and cloud capabilities. PROMOTO brings together researchers who have been exploring new programming paradigms, embracing the new realities of always connected, touch-enabled mobile devices. PROMOTO 2014 would like to invite contributions covering technical aspects of cross-platform computing, cloud computing, social applications and security. Submissions for this event are invited in the general area of mobile and touch-oriented programming languages and programming environments, and teaching of programming for mobile devices.

Apart from paper presentations, there will be ample time at PROMOTO to discuss the issues surrounding touch and mobile programming and to plan future directions.

Submission

Submissions for this event are invited in the general area of mobile and touch-oriented programming languages and programming environments, and teaching of programming for mobile devices. Topics of interest include:

Mobile and touch-oriented programming languages

Programming languages using innovative input mechanisms

Programming environments on or for mobile devices

Teaching of programming on or for mobile devices

Programming tools such as debuggers on or for mobiles devices

Libraries and programming frameworks that simplify programming for mobile devices

Very large screens and very small screens

Gestures, haptics and sound

We accept contributions of two types:

Research papers up to eight pages that describe original work in the area of mobile and touch development.

Short papers or tool demos of up to four pages of emerging ideas, research in progress, and in-practice experience.

Publication

All accepted papers will be published as part of SPLASH in the ACM Digital Library after the workshop. Closing date for submission of updated papers is currently November 20.

There will also be a Report of the Workshop in the SPLASH “Workshop Reader" after the conference which will list presentation titles and who made the presentation, describe discussions that took place and what next actions were agreed upon by the participants.